Google Stories: New Life for Photos and Videos

Are online photo albums too hard to make? Is the end result lackluster? That’s what Ben Eidelson, a product manager on the Google+ Photos team, argues. Facebook, Flickr, Dropbox and even Google+ all offer photo albums as a way to group your shots, but Eidelson and his team created Stories as an automated—yet more aesthetically appealing—alternative.

Every Google+ Photos story starts with a title—automatically generated, but editable.

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Stories are essentially interactive photo albums built into the Photos section of the Google+ app. Google’s photo software selects the best photos from an album, vacation or event, and arranges them in what looks more like a storybook than a traditional gallery. Each story starts with a title slide of text, superimposed over one of your photos.

Google+ Stories bring photos and maps together.

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With a swipe in from the right, the title slide dissolves into a map, with a line depicting your journey. Swiping the map away brings you into the Google-selected “best shots,” placed along a timeline. You can manually add captions (a “narrative,” as Google likes to call it).

After the title slide, every story offers up the location of the photos that can be linked to Google Maps if you so desire.

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As you swipe through, the captions slide out from behind photos, and the pictures move up and down along the timeline, giving the story a bit of motion. Google can add in video or automatically generated “Auto Awesome” GIFs to the timeline as well, as long as they’re in the source album. After the story ends (with a slide that says “The End,” of course), viewers can leave a +1 or a comment, or share the story if you’ve decided to share it publicly.

You can also ad a caption to each photo in your Story—Google calls them “narratives.”

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If you have any photos loaded into your Google+ account, Google will automatically sort through your pictures and turn them into stories based on when they were taken. Eidelson has photos from as far back as 2005, and the system generated stories for those old photos too.

What would a Story be without an ending?

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If you take a cluster of photos in a far-off place, Google+ will recognize that they were probably taken during a trip. It also uses image recognition to look for landmarks in your photos—the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, the Grand Canyon, etc.

Once the story generation is completed, you can edit them easily, and swap out any photos or videos you don’t like. You can also change the title for any story too.

“We wanted to make something that was more than just a photo, something that brings out the richness of the memories behind the photos so they, together, come to life,” Eidelson said. “We wanted stories to be something that wasn’t bothersome to make, something that could really be made for you and that you can tweak and share if you want to.”

Eidelson said that Google+ Stories was built to address pain points that online albums currently amplify: taking the time to upload your photos from a phone or camera to an album, sorting through all your photos to find the best shots to share, and remembering the names of places and landmarks in photos. Depending on how many photos you take, stories are created in anywhere from an hour to a day after the shots were uploaded to Google+, Eidelson said.

If you have Google location history turned on for your photos, Google will even add links to locations, so people can tap to see that spot on Google Maps. If no location info is available at all, it’ll still generate stories based on the date they were taken or uploaded to Google+.

Yes, there’s no way for any Google+ user to opt out of stories—they will be generated anyway. But by default, all stories are private and you can decide if you want to share them publicly, to a specific “circle” of Google+ friends, or to other individual Google+ users. Stories can be viewed in Google+ apps or through a Web browser.

“The goal is that each Story will be 95% ready to go and then it’s up to the user to add or take away whatever details they want, and share them or not,” Eidelson said. “We’ve all struggled with taking 300 photos and then taking days to get to sorting through them, and then not even getting around to sharing them until weeks later. We really hope stories will make this entire experience better by doing the hard parts for you.”